Hey all,
I'm about to look at upgrading the main work computer. I'd appreciate peoples thoughts.
Up front, I'm not an Apple person, so won't be venturing that way.
For the past 4 years I've been working on a Lenovo W530 workstation laptop. Gradually upgrading it as I go. It's got an i7-3720QM @2.6 and 32 gigs of ram on board with a Quadro K2000M graphics card inside. System is on an msata SSD and my working files live on a 1tb SSD in a caddy where the optical drive would go.
It still works well, but when I'm working on a multilayered .psb file from the 5dsr or the Credo 60 I'm noticing too much down time (ie finding myself surfing the net a bit more...)
It's been great because when I travel I can pick it up and move with it, continuing to do some of the grunt work, so I think it can still work well as a travelling machine, but not as my primary machine.
I'm trying to decide between jumping on to the new Lenovo P50 or building a desktop from scratch (similar to the Puget Serenity setup)
In both, I'll be running a 3 monitor set up when in the office. 1x NEC PA272W and 2x Dell 23inch ips displays for palettes etc.
I think I'd be happy outlaying $2500-$3000CAD at this point in time, but know that I'd be upgrading later on.
The majority of my work is completed in Lightroom, photoshop and C1 for the Credo.
Basic starting set up.
i7 processor (or will an i5 suffice?)
32gigs of ram
Graphics - GTX or Quadro - What do I need to run the 3 monitor setup.
2x Evo 250s - one for Operating, one for scratch disk.
So I'm trying to work out if I'll notice a significant difference between the desktop and the P50?
What's likely to be a more future proof solution?
I appreciate any thoughts people might have on this.
Thanks very much.
Cheers
Andrew
I've been building PCs since the late 1980s. My current Desktop is an I7 with 16GB RAM. It is a few years old at this point and getting ready for upgrade.
I highly recommend building your own if you don't need the portability of a laptop. While I like Asus and Gigabyte Motherboards, for my HTPC, Server and Main Photography computers, I prefer the intel boards.
Go I7 Most software now is multithreaded and can use multiple cores.
32-64GB RAM is what I would recommend. Get fast and stable.
For video, you might want to look at the NVidia Quadro cards. The workstation cards can do 30bit color with Photoshop on Windows.
Think forward in all you select. Nothing worse than wanting to add something, but the motherboard won't support it for example. USB3 support is there in all boards, but on how many ports and headers?
Spend more on the PowerSupply!!!! This is not a place to cheap out. Look at reviews, but typically Seasonic supplies have been good in the past. It changes rapidly though.
In addition to the SSD boot drive and Scratch disk, I use a pair of 1TB drives in a mirror for intermediate storage and work files before offloading to my 9TB server and DVD.